Tag: Dynamics CRM 2016

Since a few weeks I hear from more and more CRM users that their CRM notes have disappeared. They are all using Dynamics CRM 2016 (Online or Onprem) and Firefox. Other combinations are currently not affected. So it must be an CRM 2016 and Firefox 49 issue with notes on how Firefox retrieves the notes or displays them.

Analysis

You can very quickly see that it is “only” a display problem when you opening the same CRM record with two different Browsers.

on Firefox 49

on Chrome 54

But, what happens? To find this out we have to deep dive into the CSS styling of CRM.
The Firefox developertools show us that Firefox has calculated “transparent” as color for the notetext.

A look into the CSS source file shows us what Microsoft has defined as color.

Now it is clear to you that Microsoft uses the hexadecimal notation, but not if it also wants to use the shorthand notation. Browsers until now ignored the fourth digit and interpreted it as shorthand notation and calculated #000000 (Black) for the note text. Till now we are talking about an inaccuracy that nobody has disturbed.

Firefox 49 Release Notes from September 20, 2016 – SOURCEExcerpt: “Added support for specifying colors with an alpha channel using 4- and 8-digit CSS hex color values (#RRGGBBAA and #RGBA)”

BAM! There is the problem. Mozilla introduces the hexadecimal and hexadecimal shorthand notation of RGBA colors
Starting from Version 49, Firefox interprets Microsoft’s inaccuracy as an #RGBA value and calculates #00000000 from it what is black with 0% opacity as result.

Solution

The solution can only be delivered by Microsoft and is already included in Dynamics 365 (CRM V8.2). So I think it will be also fixed within the next update for CRM 2016.

Workaround

Instead of telling you to avoid Firefox until Microsoft provide a fix, I created a small script that corrects the color attribute for the notes. I know, it’s unsupported.

Drag and drop the “CRM Notes Firefox Fix” button on your Firefox bookmark toolbar to use it as bookmarklet. Click it each time you don’t see notes on CRM.